Defragment??
 

I know this will sound stupid, but what exactly is when you defrag your HD?? And how do I do it on XP? Will anything be deleted, damaged, etc??

No it wont! It basically sorts all of your files on your pc out so it can access them easier and faster.

You should do it about once a month. It takes a while so watch a film or something while you do it :)

Files on your computer get broken up into little fragments over time. So one file could be made up of 100+ fragments (I have on in over 900 the other day!). This makes accessing, reading and writing files slow. Defraging puts all these split files back together in a contiguous way so access is improved.

In explorer click on the drive, press Alt+Enter and goto tools, click on the defrag button, click start.

If you can find a book called Fundamentals of Operating Systems by A.M Lister and R.D Eager, this has loads of, quite detailed, info on opperating systems, file sysyems, memory management. Very useful for understanding this kind of thing.

The time is also dependant on how much data you have on your hard drive and how large your hard drive is. Simply put, the larger the hard drive, the more time it takes, and the larger the space taken up by files, the longer time it will take. Best to do it overnight if you have a lot of files.

also, depending on what operating system you have, older operating systesm like win98 make more of a mess of your hdd, so it usually takes longer to defrag a win98 drive, and they also, need defragging more often.

One thing you can do to speed up the defrag time:
Either defrag in safe mode, or use CTRL - ALT - DEL and
stop everything running in the background while defrag is running,
except Explorer.

While defrag is doing it's thing, whenever it runs into another (running) program,
defrag butts heads with it and starts over.
The more times this happens the longer it takes.

Read this

Also the longer you wait to defrag the harder it has to work.
I defrag once a week, and it still takes a few hours.

That's only the case on fat32 drives on win 9x. XP (on NTFS at least) doesn't have this problem due to the better file system and OS.

Good point Phily Baby.
Thanks.

No worries :)

yes, defragment OFTEN
i just defragmented for the first time in almost six months, and it took almost two days to do
my computer SUCKS

Your files get saved to your computer in order. When you delete a file, there is a "space" created on your HD. Large files may fill up more than one space, making the computer go back and forth to read the data. This slows it down. If your files are all over the computer, you defragment to remove all the useless spaces between the files and set everythign in order in turn speeding up the computer greatly.

I defragged for the first time since reformat which was about 4 months ago, and it took 3-4 hours on WinME. What's wrong with your comp!? :igor:

Speed Disk, a part of Norton Utilities is a lot quicker and effective than Windows Defrag. I only mention this because you may want to drop by your local file sharing prog....... errr, retail store and downlo...... ummmm, purchase it. ;)

LMAO!!
:D

It saves alot of time to do hu?

So Randman, I think ill downl.... purchase it from kaz... pc world to give it a test run ;)

I have now successfully defragmented my HD, and it only took an hour and a half! Thanks for the help everyone.:)

defraging my HDD right now, through the only 100% effective and foolproof system format c:

Back when i was a macuser the fastest way to defrag was to copy everything onto another drive, format the first drive, then copy it all back... i never liked waiting for a defrag to complete.

just defragmented mine... 15.5 hrs to do so.